At one time, there were only open-outcry exchanges where traders, specifically buyers and sellers or representatives of the same, would come together to trade amongst each other in person. As such, market events and market information (for example, aggregation of market events) were immediately and simultaneously visually and audibly available to the local traders and they could take action synchronously with market events if they chose to. Over time, the process of trading has largely moved onto electronic trading platforms offered by all of the major global financial exchanges and market information is serially disseminated piece by piece in the form of market data messages. Serial dissemination of individual markets or amongst groups of markets often results in timing conflicts and unnecessary messaging delays amongst different aspects of market information that traders desire to make optimal trading decisions.
With the advent of electronic trading, traders can participate via a client device(s) by communicating over physical networks (or potentially via direct memory sharing methods) through an application program interface to facilitate electronic messaging between traders' client devices and the exchange. Traders' client devices can be located at variant distances from a centralized exchange hub, including from within the same physical structure (for example, co-location). An electronic exchange operates at least one electronic market, that processes incoming orders to buy (bids) and sell (offers) submitted by traders and then broadcasts the resulting market events to all connected and subscribed traders in the form of time sequenced serial data streams commonly known as market data.
Since the advent of electronic trading, the industry as a whole has spent very large sums of money on ever advancing hardware, software and infrastructures to reduce any latency in the creation and distribution of market data and the consequent acquisition of market information by traders' client devices to the fastest degree possible. A point has been reached where microsecond and nanosecond differentials (for example, latency) in the acquisition of market information contained within the market data streams over any given set of individual market data messages can be worth large sums of money.
Market data volumes continue to grow dramatically. Electronic exchanges and/or intermediary distributors of market information continue to struggle to provide traders with actionable market information due to the limitations of the methodologies and infrastructures used to deliver a useful market information feed. Most often, traders want access to as much of this information as fast as possible so that they can make more efficient and more effective/timely trades. Despite the best efforts and large investments by everyone involved, many client devices continue to suffer from unnecessary delays in market information updates and on occasion the loss of content, due to data coalescing methods and other reasons, in the market information updates that are received. At present, there are still many disadvantages to the current methods of distribution, or at the very least the current solutions are incomplete.